"Alternative Strokes"

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Articles:

To Do or Not to Do

Nursery Cannons

Recognize Your Limitations

Alternative Strokes

An Open Shot with a Good Sequence

Alternative Leaves

Lessons to be Learned

Just pause for a moment and dissect the alternatives outlined in my preceding paragraph. If you succumb to the temptation to try your unskilled best at the close cannons, you are sure to get into trouble before you have made enough cannons to carry your break any distance worth mentioning. But if you tap the red along nicely and leave an easy in-off, you should be able to make that to leave another of the same kind from hand, which you can make to leave another red loser, and so you continue your familiar open game, with the white always handy for a cannon when you want it. This is far better billiards than temporizing with nursery cannons when you know little or nothing about these delicate strokes, and by frankly realizing this you will keep out of a "trap" which has brought many a nice break to a premature end. I know an amateur, a very nice player, who could tap off ten or a dozen cannons from the position shown in Fig. 35. He also "collects a few" at the top-of-the-table in good style as far as he goes. Yet he is beaten twice out of three times by friends who make their forty and fifty breaks by steady hazard striking, and who never try to play close cannons or the spot-end game, because they know they cannot do so. He came to me for advice on the matter, and after watching his play, I told him, "You are always trying to do more than you can do in a positional sense. If you had to play billiards for a living, and put in some hours of steady practice every day for a year at least, you would be able to do what you now try to do." His friends made no such mistake. They were content to make sound, open breaks, utilizing the red to the best of their ability, and, as often as not, leaving the balls pretty safe when they left off scoring. He, on the contrary, was always "sticking them up" when he just failed to score through trying to leave the balls as Newman or Falkiner might when operating at the spot-end. I advise you to avoid this sort of thing; know exactly what you cannot do, and open the game up accordingly instead of trying to play "tip tap" billiards which is invariably quite beyond your skill of cue.

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